Secondly, this claim was made by Apple on their features page. I’m with them, in that Safari 4 is a browser for public use, offered by default on the website. Opera 10 is not, you have to specifically go to opera.com/next to get it. Opera may have rendered Acid 3 first in the labs, but it needs to be in people’s laps, and Safari has done that better.

IE8 does not pass Acid 3! It doesn’t support SVG for starters. Secondly, this claim was made by Apple on their features page. I’m with them, in that Safari 4 is a browser for public use, offered by default on the website. Opera 10 is not, you have to specifically go to opera.com/next to get it. Opera may have rendered Acid 3 first in the labs, but it needs to be in people’s laps, and Safari has done that better.

So Safari wins the award of making it's beta software easier for n00bs to download - big deal.
Fact is Opera is still publicly downloadable, despite whatever semantics Apple's BS crew spew out on their web site.

Sorry, you're right about IE8. I don't run windows so couldn't test it though I was sure I read an article saying it had. Clearly I must have dreamt it :$ "

Not quite dreamt it perhaps ... IE8 passes Acid 2. Perhaps that is what the article you read was about.

AFAIK IE8 scores only about 20% on Acid 3 tests. Since IE does not implement DOM2 nor SVG nor SMIL nor CSS3 nor even CSS2 completely ... this is not all that surprising I suppose.

Amusingly ... there was a bug submitted to the IE development process about DOM2 way back when. The IE development team closed it with the comment "not implemented by design". Anyway, the fact that IE does not support DOM2 means that it cannot properly support HTML5, even though there is apparently a sham attempt at doing so in IE8.

Microsoft's sole "push" to compete in this area of rich web content is apparently Silverlight ... which is a totally non-standard (and proprietary) way of doing the type of things that these web standards facilitate (and do quite well). This is probably what Microsoft meant when they said about DOM2 - "not implemented by design". Typical.

Secondly, this claim was made by Apple on their features page. I’m with them, in that Safari 4 is a browser for public use, offered by default on the website. Opera 10 is not, you have to specifically go to opera.com/next to get it. Opera may have rendered Acid 3 first in the labs, but it needs to be in people’s laps, and Safari has done that better.

Sorry Kroc, you are just too much biased. Laurence is right, Opera pre-release is publically available just as it is now Safari pre-release, so Safari wasn't the first Acid3 browser. It doesn't matter if Safari is better linked in Apple's homepage than Opera in Opera's homepage, this is just "an implementation detail". The fact is that if you wanted, 2 days ago you could have entered opera.com and downloaded an Acid3 browser.

Opera was the first browser to score 100/100 on Acid3, however that was a version of the Acid3 test with a bug in one of the tests - the actual score for Opera was therefore 99/100.

WebKit (Nightly) was the first browser to score 100/100 on Acid3 with a non-buggy test suite. Opera followed a day or two later.

WebKit is the rendering engine for Safari - WebKit browsers are bleeding edge versions of Safari, built using the very latest source code for rendering engine. These are effectively alpha releases of Safari.

A score of 100/100 on Acid3 however is not a "pass", since smoothness of animation is a deciding factor (as well as the render of the test matching a reference rendering). Judging whether or not a browser passes is thus subjective, but most people consider that WebKit passed some time ago, and that no other browser has truly passed yet.